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Tuesday, September 11, 2012

The Market Society – A Moral Vacuum

A market economy is a
powerful tool for creating wealth and generating innovation for societies. A
market society is a society where market values have gone beyond the economy to
infiltrate the social, civic, and moral spheres.

The idea of a “good” has been
devalued to refer solely to monetary value, leaving out social, civic, and moral
values. This has created a vacuum that the evils of corruption and fanaticism have swept in to
fill.

Neoliberals have substituted the will of the free market for conscious morality
and civility, for the emptiest form of profit, enriching bank accounts instead
of lives and peoples. Neoconservatives, being fanatical, use fascist tactics to
simplify the spread of corruption and the monetization of everything, including citizenship and
life. Distrustful of government’s capability to
maintain efficient, beneficial order, conservatives would rather trust
everything to the chaos of the market.

People sell their bodies, rights, and dignity regularly. The free market
argues that this is done between consenting adults for agreed upon value, but
gross inequality introduces the coercion of poverty which negates free choice,
a free market, and a free society.

An unregulated market economy creates a market society vacuum. Only the active pursuit of a rich
range of “goods”, with inherent “value”, that “profit” everyone can purge the
corruption and restore a market society to a just one.

The following book goes into
this in detail. Here is the interview on The Current that I heard about it from.

What Money Can't Buy: Michael Sandel

Economists refer to the free market as the
invisible hand. But according to Michael Sandel, it's become more like a
scratching claw. Michael Sandel says market ideology has come to shape, mould
and influence parts of our lives and societies where it has no proper
place. Michael Sandel is a political philosopher at Harvard University
whose new book is called What Money Can't Buy: The Moral
Limits of Markets and he is our guest today.

Part Three of The Current

What Money Can't Buy: Michael Sandel

Economists refer to the free market as the
invisible hand. But according to our next guest, it's become more like a
scratching claw. Michael Sandel says market ideology has come to shape, mould
and influence parts of our lives and societies where it has no proper place. Michael Sandel is a political
philosopher at Harvard University. His new book is called What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets.

And as part of our project, Line in the Sand, looking at the ethical and moral
issues that define and complicate our lives, Michael Sandel joins us from
Boston.

From
Amazon.ca

What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets by
Michael J. Sandel.

Publication Date: April 24
2012

Should we pay children to
read books or to get good grades? Should we allow corporations to pay for the
right to pollute the atmosphere? Is it ethical to pay people to test risky new
drugs or to donate their organs? What about hiring mercenaries to fight our
wars? Auctioning admission to elite universities? Selling citizenship to
immigrants willing to pay?

In What Money Can’t Buy,
Michael J. Sandel takes on one of the biggest ethical questions of our time: Is
there something wrong with a world in which everything is for sale? If so, how
can we prevent market values from reaching into spheres of life where they
don’t belong? What are the moral limits of markets?

In recent decades, market
values have crowded out nonmarket norms in almost every aspect of
life—medicine, education, government, law, art, sports, even family life and
personal relations. Without quite realizing it, Sandel argues, we have drifted
from having a market economy to being a market society. Is this
where we want to be?

In his New York Times bestseller
Justice, Sandel showed himself to be a master at illuminating, with
clarity and verve, the hard moral questions we confront in our everyday lives.
Now, in What Money Can’t Buy, he provokes an essential discussion that
we, in our market-driven age, need to have: What is the proper role of markets
in a democratic society—and how can we protect the moral and civic goods that
markets don’t honor and that money can’t buy?

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About Me

The Pündi are a race from my fantasy novels, the Continuum Chronicles, an exploration of spiritual evolution theory. Appearing like us, they are really child-sized aliens cursed by their own intelligence, trapped as observers unable to share their knowledge. They often develop an individual obsessive interest.

I write and publish, not selling anything, just trying to share ideas that might profit everyone. I aim not for originality but creativity, organizing what exists to generate new associations. I'm a writer with thick glasses and autism, familiar with the struggle for clarity. Novelist, researcher, internet activist, spiritual evolutionist, and process philosopher, I believe in democratic social capitalism with a well-regulated engine of sustainable markets. As a writer, I find that most blockages tend to be improvements trying to occur to me.